3 Ways Your Event Data Can Help You Succeed At Your Next Event

Posted by Ben Crook on 20 November 2018

Event data holds the key to future fundraising success at your events. Whether your data takes the form of surveys, information collected through ticket purchases, or data captured via your silent auction technology provider, it can help you with discovering trends, understanding your demographic and satisfying future attendees which will ultimately help you raise even more!

1)Discover trends

Past event data can help you discover new trends and understand them within the context of your audience. However, this is no easy feat if you have collected a large amount of data. Instead of sifting through it all, look out for when donations peaked at your event and try and understand what provoked this peak, which items had the most bids, and when there were lulls at your event. This will reveal the element of the event you should replicate at your next event and the areas that could be improved to maximise fundraising. If, for example, donations started rapidly increasing when your MC came on, consider introducing your MC earlier in your next event and having him/her stay on stage for longer. By making seemingly small changes you could benefit from more donations and bids!

If you used fundraising technology, the data points mentioned above will be incredibly easy to get a hold of!

2)Understand your demographics

Who actually attended the event? What was the age range? What was the gender ratio? Keeping an eye on data like this can help you plan and enhance your guests experience. The auction items you provide, the pre-event advertising you use to promote, even the style of event could be changed based on what you find from this data. For example, you may have hired a young, popular singer to entertain your guests at the gala ball, but you then receive your post event data and find that most of your attendees were members of an older generation and didn’t fully appreciate the artist performing. Next time, you could save money on booking a high-end celebrity and instead invest in another type of performance that would be more engaging to your specific demographic which could allow you to make your event an even bigger fundraising success.

3) Satisfy future attendees

Its paramount to also record attendee satisfaction, to determine whether the event met the expectations of your audience. This is most commonly obtained through a post-event survey (tip: make sure you send your survey out 2-3 days after the event to receive the most responses!). Asking specific questions such as, Which part of the event did you enjoy most? or Which section of the event was the most memorable?, can generate more specific feedback that could help you transform certain parts of your event to maximise success. Another great question to ask is Would you attend the same event next year?. This is a perfect way to see if your guests truly enjoyed the event if they did, then they would undoubtedly return again, and as we all know, retaining donors is easier then attracting new ones!

If you would like learn more about how to capture the data your event produces, please get in touch!

Ben Crook

Chief Operating Officer

Ben is at the forefront of every project in Givergy, listing and actioning constant improvements across the business. With over a decade of experience in the charity and events sector he brings a deep understanding of what the fundraising industry needs to operate effectively and efficiently.